soyuz1917I’ve told you this before, the Russians assume a NATO first strike that leaves them with 10% or less of their deliverable warheads. The assumption is they only have 200 warheads left and probably no more than 50 delivery vehicles for them. Degrade that a further 25% with you missile defense systems and the Russian second strike capability essentially becomes a joke. The systems most likely to survive a NATO first strike also happen to be of the tactical low yield variety.
This is the problem Russia sees with missile defense. Their’s is is completely rational, completely real worry and there are no arguments you can make that undo the this truth unless you admit that missile defense will never work PERIOD.
soyuz1917if you havent been keeping up NATO pulls the same crap near Russian air space every day of the week too. Just this past week the Russian navy was complaining about Orions and Swedish Gulfstream surveillance planes flying over the Northern fleets training waters.
Russian planes intercept NATO planes approaching Russian airspace hundreds of times a year too.
The Russian problem is not that there are intercepts but that they claim that the intercepts are being done in an unsafe way. 😎
soyuz1917so is that antenna an AESA or what? :confused:
soyuz1917you are mistaken if you think the current generation of Russian politicos care about how many F-35’s and AEGIS ships the US builds. The Russians have the oil stick and they now realize they dont need the guns and missiles to throw their weight around. Hell, they would arguably be happy to see the US building more oil burning toys that add nothing to GDP. Think about how much jet fuel those 4 F-18’s burnt to go after one single Tu-95. Oil is at $105 a barrel and every time those F-18’s go up Rosneft makes a few more dollars. There are no plans for a serious Russian conventional buildup and even on the nuclear side they are building very modestly. They make a lot of noise, but they don’t really care much about what the US military does.
soyuz1917yeah, if you are going to upgrade a fulcrum the first thing you need to do is pop out those smokey old RD-33’s and stick in the new SeaWasp engines, but this upgrade was done on the cheap and mostly involved sticking in a few bits of Western avionics to make these birds NATO “compliant.”
To be a little nice to the RD-33 the engine smokes like crazy at low speed but the faster you go the less of a problem the smoke becomes.
soyuz1917it is very unlikey the RS-24 will be a new missile because of how few test launches are planned. If it were a truly new design it would require a good 2 more years and at least a half dozen more test fires before it could be inducted than what they have planned for it. Bulava is a new design and look how thoroughly screwed up the program is. There are some sources talking about induction dates of 2012!!! now.
soyuz1917a Norweigan P-3 over flew the Kuz only a little over a month ago and an F-16 flew right over the Mosckva too. There were video of both on zvezdanews and pics posted on this very forum.
soyuz1917I dont understand what maintenance has to do with it, most NATO fighters and platforms have NOT seen upgrade in 20+ years. How many AESA equipped F-15’s are there really? 50? They upgraded those 2-3 squadrons in Alaska and then stopped. The bulk of the fleet may be well maintained but the electronics are decades old.
soyuz1917Yeah, most of these are 1980’s era assets, but then again how old is you average NATO fighter plane again? Oh, waits, they are the same mean age! The poor Russkies! All those 1980’s era platforms going up against other 1980’s era platforms, WHAT WILL THEY DO? :confused: 😮
There are scores of problems within the Russian military that dont need to be exaggerated out of proportion you know. They are scrapping corvettes in ridiculous numbers with nothing coming in to replace them. The age of their destroyers is not even remotely as big a problem as the decaying state of the green water portion of the fleet. Those Nanuchkas and the like need replacing before they can think about replacing the Sovs and Udaloys. Smaller combatants have shorter useful lives than larger combatants. Procurement of the 20380 corvettes is the top surface fleet priority and will be for at least another decade to come. They need at least 20 of them and 30 would be even better.
As for hangars, the soviets never built many. The Russians have almost all their bombers outside in vast parking lots. We have satellite images of it all in the open source. Google earth is your biggest friend! Our commercial jets have no problem lasting 20+ years spending most of their time outside just like this, I dont see a big problem with it.
soyuz1917alas, the Su-27 does NOT have a clean record. During the Georgian civil war someone downed a Russian Su-27 flown by a supposed top notch pilot, an instructor no less, with what was probably an ancient SA-3. He was flying low and slow and with no Sorbitsa pod. What isnt clear is who shot him down or even what missile did it. It could have been friendly fire, but more likely it was a Georgian missile. He thought he was immune to anything in theater and he wasnt. :dev2:
This thread has really gone to hell IMHO.
Drunk Russian sailors? I think not. When were they drinking? When they were conducting passing exercises with the French or was it with the Italians? The biggest lapse of discipline was when the captain let his men do some fishing off the Moskva.
They really are reducing their nuclear arsenal. I think some of you have been reading to many crazy right wing blogs.
soyuz1917Russians follow titles more so than men. Trust me, Putins personal power is finished. Russian PM’s are an impotent bunch. If he leaves the presidency within weeks Medvedev will have the backing he needs from power structures to oust Putin if he so desires. They are the best of friends so absent a giant disaster there will probably be no need for him to make such a move immediately.
There is no way that Putin will take presidential power with him to the PM spot, thats just not how Russian political reality works. One need only look at the Gorby v. Yeltsin conflict of years past to see how title settles things in Russia.
The job of president wears on these people and after 8 years Putin is visibly tired and much more emotional than he originally was hence the sorts of outbursts we’ve seen. A new man brings new logic and new energy to the equation or so one hopes :rolleyes:
soyuz1917pot — kettle — black! I trust you all remember that Iranian airliner the US navy mistook for a fighter bomber and shot out of the sky.
They put up 22 aircraft because Ivan got to within 650km’s of Tokyo which is a little close for comfort. If B2’s were 650 km’s out from Moscow those Topol’s would fly.
Ivan needs a good tongue lashing. This is how the Germans behaved after Hitler restored some national pride. This sort of behavior cant end well for them or anyone else. Putin will be out of office in a month so I think all this machismo stuff will end soon — hopefully.
I dont see a little lawyer douche like Medvedev sending Bears to buzz Tokyo, do you?
Then again, considering the avionics those Bears have they might not have realized exactly where they were until it was to late so there is a small chance it was a mistake.
soyuz1917no that wont make it impossible or even all that difficult to vector an intercept against.
The better question is how on earth are you ever going to do an intercept if it comes in below your radar like it was meant to do in an actual war. I dont think there are to many low level SAM’s in Alaska. The blackjack has a terrain hugging mode. If they really wanted to penetrate Alaskan airspace without being intercepted they could 😮
There is also the question of its ECM suite.
The Russian last week claimed to have jammers that could jam the new X-band the US wants to build in Europe. I would imagine they have toys against early warning installations in Alaska too. How effective they are is anyones guess.
Back in Afghanistan in the 80’s the Tu-22’s put up jamming so thick the Pakistanis never managed to burn through. No Tu-22’s were lost in the war.
soyuz1917to be a bit more fair to them its not really incompetence on the part of the Russian crews as much as it is the limit of technology. I dont imagine that the US navy could find and intercept any ship all that much faster.
You are literally looking for a needle in a gigantic blue, cold and very wet haystack. They were hunting the Kuz so its not as if they were radioed exact coordinates for him — they had to do all the work. 3 hours just shows you how challenging a task it can be under the VERY BEST of conditions. My source for all this is vesti and zvezdannews. You are all free to browse their websites for the clips I’m talking about from the exercise.
The weather was so bad they never actually saw the Kuz from any window on the Tu’s they only knew he was there from radar.
An additional question to discuss is just how long does it take to get a A-50 airborne. Those analog electronics (vacuum tubes) on it take 2 hours!!!! just to turn on and you cant do this in the air apparently it has to be done on the ground. Just sortieing their airborne radars in a timely fashion in a shooting war will be a challenge.
soyuz1917never underestimate the incompetence of your typical Russkie. That line about Russians always having a plan in Hunt for Red October should have been “your average ruskie captain never makes a plan without taking a dump on it first.”
I’m as much a russophile as many of you having grown up on this stuff, but lets face reality here. From the recent videos we have of the Kuz on maneuvers from Vesti and Zvezdanews we know that those bombers had a hell of a time finding their own carrier group! With a seach zone twice the size of Moscow it took them 3 hours just to find the ship once they arrived on station. Imagine doing this in war time with only one operational US-PU sat! Good bloody luck. They used the A-50 with them to cut what would have been an impossible job otherwise down to a 3 hour job. Am I the only one who watches Russian TV? How many A-50’s can they dedicate to hunting carriers when they have land based fighters to vector against other land based fighters in a real war too? The Kuz wasnt exactly moving at 30 knots most of the time either.
Honestly, they practice jumping air strips once or twice a year! If you think they waste fuel on this stuff routinely you are delusional. Catching them in base would not be hard these days.
Tu-22’s today are certainly not for nuclear strike. In ALL the recent exercises the Tu-22’s dropped plain old iron bombs and only dumb ones too. It’s their defacto platform for bombing savages in caves.
Bomber pilots flew “over 80 hours” last year.
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